Research

A new EWG analysis has found that the overwhelming majority of Midwestern counties with increased precipitation between 2001 and 2020 also had growing crop insurance costs during that period due to...

Farmers received almost $7.4 billion in payments from two of the largest federal agricultural conservation programs between 2017 and 2020, but only a small proportion of these payments went to...

Between 2018 and 2020, farmers across the country likely dipped into three types of taxpayer-funded farm support programs to the combined value of $91.6 billion, an EWG analysis found.

The almost $1.5 billion in federal crop insurance indemnities sent to farmers in the Mississippi River Critical Conservation Area for flooding damage between 2001 and 2020 could have instead taken...

A new interactive EWG map highlights county “hot spots” that received disproportionately large and frequent crop insurance payments in the Mississippi River Critical Conservation Area, or MRCCA. The...

Farmers received more than $143.5 billion in federal crop insurance payments from 1995 through 2020, and just under two-thirds of it was for crop damage from drought and excess moisture exacerbated by...

The Federal Crop Insurance Program is a federally subsidized program that pays farmers when their crop yields or revenues decline, expending billions of taxpayer dollars each year.

The Department of Agriculture has known for almost a century that planting cover crops between growing seasons benefits soil, water and air quality. Now the USDA, heartland politicians and the...

Taxpayer-funded farm subsidies have long been skewed in favor of the richest farmers and landowners. But under the Trump administration, even more money went to the largest and wealthiest farms...

Timeline: Black farmers and the USDA, 1920 to present

After a decline in crop prices in 2014 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture boosted farmers' income by more than $13 billion through two newly enacted subsidy programs. But during the same...

Is Federal Crop Insurance Policy Leading to Another Dust Bowl?

North Carolina boasts the nation's second biggest hog farming industry, worth $3 billion in hog and pig sales in 2012 alone, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It ranks third among the...

There's a lot of doom and gloom in the air about the state of the farm economy. As commodity prices continue to fall from the historic highs of the last few years, advocates for the agriculture...

It's a complete misnomer even to call the federal crop insurance program “insurance.” It works nothing like the private insurance market because taxpayers pay about 60 percent of the premiums, all the...

The cost to taxpayers of providing crop insurance to farmers has more than tripled since 2001, rising from an average of about $3 billion a year in 2001-2003 to more than $10 billion a year in 2012...

The congressional budget deal signed by President Obama in early November includes a cost-saving measure that trims the profits taxpayers guarantee the crop insurance industry. The guaranteed rate of...

The federal crop insurance program has come under attack for its increasing cost, environmental impacts and secrecy. But the farm lobby, the crop insurance industry and their political patrons...

The so-called “prevented planting” component of the federal crop insurance program is wasting billions of dollars while encouraging growers to plow up wildlife-sustaining wetlands in the iconic...

Defenders of genetically engineered crops regularly claim that these varieties cut erosion by encouraging farmers to use tillage practices that enhance soil conservation.

Congress could dramatically cut spending on the federal crop insurance program without sacrificing anything other than the political objective of propping up a crop insurance industry that only exists...

The federal government paid out $11.3 million in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies to 50 billionaires or farm businesses in which they had an interest between 1995 and 2012, and changes to the farm bill...

Supporters of the House and Senate versions of the stalled farm bill are arguing that they represent historic reform because both would replace Direct Payments with a suite of new subsidies designed...

There were two reasons that Environmental Working Group commissioned agricultural economist Bruce Babcock of Iowa State University to analyze how the heavily subsidized federal crop insurance program...